Why the KIDS Act Is a Bad Idea

In yet another example of Congress favoring political expediency in an election year over common sense, the Senate last week passed a bill called the KIDS (Keeping the Internet Devoid of Sexual predators) Act. This bill purportedly will require convicted sex offenders to register their email addresses and IM screen names with a federal database for the express intent of keeping sex offenders away from social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook.

From Politico:

Under the registration requirement approved by the Senate, social networking
sites would have access to the government database of e-mail addresses and
screen names and would be encouraged to ban those on it. It would be a violation
of parole or probation to use different online identifiers. The National Center
for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) supports the bill, as does MySpace,
Facebook, Microsoft and the American Family Association. One catch for
Democrats: So too, of course, does the presumptive Republican presidential
nominee, who issued a press release Wednesday calling on the House to pass it as
soon as possible.

Put frankly, this bill is all kinds of stupid. Here are four reasons why:

First and foremost, the efficacy of such a mandate is just shy of impossible. A person, sex offender or otherwise, can easily and anonymously sign up for and utilize a different email address and/or IM screen name as often as he chooses. For example, Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail and others offer unlimited access to new email addresses, limited only by one's imagination and patience.

Secondly, does the terrorist no-fly database ring a bell with these politicians? Maybe they should ask Senator Ted Kennedy or Nobel Prize winner Nelson Mandela about how well that bureaucratic data dump has worked. There are 44,000+ names on that list; how many hundreds of thousands of email addresses and IM names would end up on the KIDS Act list? And is it going to be publicly accessible? A one-character misspelling (e.g., Coolguy14 v. CooIguy14) could be the difference between a teenager on social networking sites versus a purported sex offender. The hassle that either would have to deal with is not acceptable.

Third, what does someone who was accused and convicted of sexual assualt within a marriage have to do with keeping social networking sites free from 'predators?' Or how does any sexual crime involving two adults have anything at all to do with access to those sites on the internet? If we can restrict a convicted rapist from discrete parts of the internet, why wouldn't we similarly be able to restrict him from certain parts of town? From a libertarian perspective, once a convicted felon has paid his debt to society in the form of imprisonment and/or other restrictions of liberty, he should be free to do as he pleases within the confines of the law. This is an unconscionable power-grab away from the liberty of sexual felons in the name of children's safety.

Finally, the public policy behind this bill is too broad in that it purports to target social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook that have a large contingent of minors accessing it. What about other social networking sites not as heavily emphasized on minors such as Twitter, various news sites or sports message boards? Are sexual felons also banned from using those sites?

It should be clear by now, given all the holes in the bill as passed by the Senate, that the KIDS Act should be thrown into the trash and tried again. But it's unclear how likely that is in the current environment that supports further and further restriction of the rights of sexual felons. At least two Democrats in the House of Representatives (Rep. John Conyers - MI and Rep. Bobby Scott - VA) seem to understand the uselessness of the registration component, as they have spearheaded a version of the bill without that piece in the past. It's worth staying tuned to see how the House handles the bill this time around.